My sister bought a bicycle the other day. A cruiser. Yeahh... She was going to cruise around her little town of Marblehead on it - until she fell off trying to get out of the way of a poor guy just trying to get out of the parking lot. The poor guy felt so bad! Because she's a woman of a certain age, she thought she could just buy a bike and ride it - uh uh... You need to LEARN HOW, first.
All kidding aside, I'm so happy she has a bike. Now, we can ride to Salem Willows together and eat chop suey sandwiches, ride along the beach AND get our excercise at the same time. We'll get cute clothes to ride in and we'll search far and wide for cute helmets. (Is there such a thing)? I'm sure there is.
So, now that I've committed myself to Seascape and secured a friend to ride shotgun, I guess I gotta write! Like any other skill, we have to practice to get better and I haven't been practicing much lately. Now that I work only three days a week one would think I'd have plenty of time to write. Well, my time is spent on the porch thinking about writing, thinking about what my characters might be up to and thinking about that long line of people holding hardcover editions of my awesome story in their hands waiting for me to autograph them. Which begs the question, what is the real motive here? Is it that long line of fans? Is it the table stacked with my books, bookmarks and chapsticks? I thought long and hard about this and came to the conclusion that it's the women I write about. They're real women. Their names are fictional, but they're real. They walk among us, most hiding their trouble, just trying to fit in. I admire the women who choose to not take the easy way out. To go for the gusto. To make their own lives happen.
I’ve heard that if we want to be happy we should surround ourselves with like-minded people. I believe that to be true, so I said yes to an invitation to meet for coffee from a woman I would have met at a writing retreat in a few weeks. Happily, we hit it off. We have so much in common that neither of us can get it all out fast enough! I think that’s pretty funny. I have to make a conscious effort to not interrupt and say, “Me too, me too,” every five minutes, which, at my age means, I may lose the thought forever.
As I wrote in an earlier post, it has never really been easy for me to make friends but I see this friendship lasting a long time. Well, given that I’m old, at least until I croak.
